Ever wondered how TV apps are made? How it differs from the usual web app or mobile app development? I was fortunate enough to work on TV platforms for about year now, and there is some exciting stuff for me to share around this subject. I will first give an introduction on TV platforms, then explain why we decided to use web technology to build TV apps, finally I'll go through some of the challenges we faced that are specific to TV app development.

Micro-frontend is not a new concept, it is simply a rebranded idea which is now a new buzz word. In this blog post, we'll talk about what it is and why it is here, but more importantly, I hope to illustrate that people shouldn't shy away from micro-frontend because they probably know a lot about the subject already.

After almost 4 months of volunteering, I've learned that running a weekly session for one volunteer is too much. Also don't try to teach big topics that span over a few sessions, because people will drop in and out. They will struggle after missing sessions and either stop attending or come in feeling very lost the next time. People love coding games and challenges instead of tasks with vague requirements like "make a website that uses HTML form". Going forward I'm going to try smaller bite-sized sessions so people can drop in and out more freely.

New to Visual Studio Code (VS Code)? This post will walk you through the most useful and commonly used VS code shortcuts. Some of them might take some getting used to, but once you are comfortable using them instead of clicking around with a mouse you should see your productivity skyrocket!

Going forward I am updating how blog posts are structured. My thinking is that it will help people to consume the content and makes it a fun challenge for me. So each blog post will have summary as its first paragraph, then go on to the main body of the content. If possible, I will keep the most relevant and important stuff at the top and the least at the bottom of the page. Hope everyone (the very few people who visit my blog) enjoys the new change.

I have been doing a lot of reading on React Hook, there's quite the hype for it. The more I read, the more I understood why. It will breakdown existing complex app logic into simpler, flatter architecture. There were some key points I wrote down as part of my reading, which I think will be very helpful later to refresh my memories and decided to upload it on here for others to see as well. It is a digested version of the reading materials I listed in the source section below.

React is arguably the most popular JavaScript rending library/framework right now. With its rising popularity and now dominating the job market, many similar JavaScript rendering libraries followed suit and adopted JSX into their work. In case you are new to frontend development, JSX is a JavaScript Syntax introduced as part of React (open sourced by Facebook back in 2015). Now you can find JSX in not only projects that are meant to be similar to React (e.g. Preact) but also things like Nerv, infernojs, Deku, and etc.

As developers lists are one of the main things we work with, for no other reason than it is such a powerful data visualisation technique. We use it so much that it is second nature to dump a list of data on the screen. This is fine for users with good hardware devices and fast internet connection. But what about when we don't have the ideal scenario? In this article, we'll talk about some nice techniques we can use to improve user experience with lists on low-end devices or slow internet connection.

In this article, we'll be covering how to do configure Cordova to automatically filter supported devices. Thus saving you or someone else ticking and unticking hundreds if not thousands of boxes on Android app stores.

I volunteered a couple of weeks back and offered to teach whoever is interested to learn to code. It takes place in my local library, which fortunately for me, is very close to both where I live and work. Today, I just had my first session. This is the first time I'm doing something like this, though I'd share my experience and learnings. In case anyone is thinking of doing something similar.